Maintainer's Corner

Readme for Cabal-1.22.1.0

The Cabal library package

If you also want the cabal command-line program, you need the
cabal-install package in addition to this library.

Installing the Cabal library

If you already have the cabal program

In this case run:

$ cabal install

However, if you do not have an existing version of the cabal program,
you first must install the Cabal library. To avoid this bootstrapping
problem, you can install the Cabal library directly as described below.

Installing as root or Administrator

Compiling Setup rather than using runghc Setup is much faster and
works on Windows. For all packages other than Cabal itself, it is fine
to use runghc.

This will install into /usr/local on Unix, and on Windows it will
install into $ProgramFiles/Haskell. If you want to install elsewhere,
use the --prefix= flag at the configure step.

Using older versions of GHC and Cabal

It is recommended that you leave any pre-existing version of Cabal
installed. In particular, it is essential you keep the version that
came with GHC itself, since other installed packages require it (for
instance, the "ghc" API package).

Prior to GHC 6.4.2, however, GHC did not deal particularly well with
having multiple versions of packages installed at once. So if you are
using GHC 6.4.1 or older and you have an older version of Cabal
installed, you should probably remove it by running:

$ ghc-pkg unregister Cabal

or, if you had Cabal installed only for your user account, run:

$ ghc-pkg unregister Cabal --user

The filepath dependency

Cabal uses the filepath package, so it must be installed first.
GHC version 6.6.1 and later come with filepath, however, earlier
versions do not by default. If you do not already have filepath,
you need to install it. You can use any existing version of Cabal to do
that. If you have neither Cabal nor filepath, it is slightly
harder but still possible.

Bugs

Your help

To help Cabal's development, it is enormously helpful to know from
Cabal's users what their most pressing problems are with Cabal and
Hackage. You may have a favourite Cabal bug or limitation. Look at
Cabal's bug tracker. Ensure that the problem is reported there and
adequately described. Comment on the issue to report how much of a
problem the bug is for you. Subscribe to the issues's notifications to
discussed requirements and keep informed on progress. For feature
requests, it is helpful if there is a description of how you would
expect to interact with the new feature.